Pop band Pony Village's levels and layers

Pony Village, the bandPony Village is the name of a mall outside North Bend. It's also the name of a band from Portland.

On the surface, these two facts have very little to do with each other. While the mall sells trinkets and knickknacks, the group peddles moody rock music featuring hushed vocals, shifting arrangements, crisp drums and subtle uses of guitar effects.

But the name isn't completely tongue-in-cheek. Dig a little deeper, and connections emerge.

"A lot of the lyrics Ryan writes deal with memories and things from his past, things from his youth, things he went through," drummer Jonah Nolde says of Pony Village bandmate Ryan Barber (guitar, lead vocals), who grew up in the North Bend area north of Coos Bay. "It's definitely his ideas that come through in the songs."

Take the lyrics to "Cowboy Phase" from the group's latest release, "P.V.E.P.": "It seems like fun/until someone puts out an eye/It seems like fun/until it happens twice/and you're the one that's blind."

Sung in a voice akin to the sandpaper-tongued falsetto of Doug Martsch from Built to Spill, Barber's lyrics can move from longing to accusation in the space of a verse, recalling the mercurial emotions evoked by the shopping malls of the teenage years.

His and Nolde's partnership began around 2003 with Dot Dot Dot, the Corvallis-based noise-pop group that specialized in spacey excursions with as much emphasis on blistering walls of sound as actual songs. They went on to play together in a variety of bands, including Field Trip, Alaskus and offshoots. Two years ago, Barber began writing a batch of songs and recording them to four-track. After recruiting bass player Colin Hulbert, Pony Village was ready to present this new material, which is more song-focused and opts for smaller textural gestures.

That's not to say that the band -- which recently added a fourth member, Marlon Gonda, on guitar and Fender Rhodes electric piano -- doesn't still find a variety of levels within a simple pop song.

In "Depoe Bay," a dark country-surf guitar chord stretches across a driving drumbeat, only to break into a descending series of notes that double back on each other like a road down the back side of a mountain. All the while, a barely audible ringing adds a note of sadness to the affair, recalling the buzzing of the drone strings on a sitar.

"We wanted more layering," Nolde says. Layers abound even in the more concise products of Pony Village. The band, not the mall.